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So furance fuel was nice in a sense that is allowed you to get past technical problems with the code, but now that we have the new flags, I find myself wondering if it is really necessary. Other mods like The North and Small Village get by just fine with using charcoal directly, and the transformation into furnace fuel seems kind of an illogical and unnecessary step.
One possibility is to make charcoal the default industrial fuel for everything from distilling to smelting. Maybe for smelting metals we toss in coal as well.
Another way is to make firewood the easiest and cheapest fuel to produce. Charcoal is made by refining firewood and is a more powerful fuel. (You get more charcoal per firewood unit spent.)
Coal meanwhile is a more powerful industrial fuel. (You need less coal for industrial recipes) and can be refined into coke to use as fuel for a much greater return.
Like say for ten units of charcoal you only need five units of coal, and for fuel production you get six units of charcoal for every four firewood, while you get ten units of coke for every five units of coal?

I'll be blunt, I don't like the idea of having to rebuild the inshore fishers every 100 cycles at all. I'm very much a person that likes to build the chain and then not have to worry about managing it. I do however like the idea of it being a boat. It fits.
Also about the pine forester, would it be possible to turn pine resin into pine pitch? Right now the pitch is just more useful to me.

So as I think more and more about city builders, I come to a common problem. Is it better to have specific resources (salmon, granite, mangoes) or generic resources (fish, stone, fruit.)
Generic resources have the advantage in that they keep things simple, and make it easier for wide-encompassing production chains.
Specific resources have the advantage in giving more life to a game and allow for more variety in harvesting.
Now some of the best games use a variety of these. For example, Banished has specific foods, but generic fish, herbs, stone, and wood.
But what do you guys thinks, what's the best way to implement resources in city builder games?

I would argue that. Irrigation at least was, and is still highly regulated in many civilizations. Roman aquaducts are one of the biggest examples of this... this wasn't just a bunch of neighbors digging a ditch, those were huge endevors requiring skilled engineers and the resources of an empire

So water is not really handled in banished, except in the context of fire control. In fact it's an area where many city builders tend to fall short. And yet if you look, water is one of the most important resources in human existence. After thinking long and hard about the problem, I've come up with a system that might work. Though again, how it might be implemented in code I am not sure.
Basically, every house and building that requires water has a small guage that shows how much water is stored. If it falls too low, than a resident or employee will travel to the nearest water source to fill it up again. As long as the guage is full everything runs smoothly.
Source of water can include springs, rivers, and freshwater lakes. It can also include artifical sources like wells, fountains, reservoirs, and canals.
Now if you want to go simple, than you can expand your supply of water by constructing canals or aqueducts that bring waters sources closer to where they are needed. Either by pumping it from a well or by linking the canal to a natural source like a lake, a spring or a stream. Maybe have a more advanced pumphouse building and pipes that can bring water to businesses and homes without the need for someone to go out and fetch water.
But, if you wanted to go a step further... introduce water capacity. Each natural source has a limit to how much water can be drawn from it. Every spring produces a set number of liters of water, every stream and river is supplied by an unseen source that is constantly pumping water down it, and there is an unseen groundwater source that determines how much water can be pulled from your wells.
Now lets say that lakes and reservoirs act as storage units. They are filled up by rain and by water flowing into them from streams. Streams and canals connected to them also drain water. If the imput is higher than the output, the lake fills up, if it is lower than the lake drains. If it drain too much than good luck fishing or using any marine industries built on its shore. In reverse, if a lake or stream is over capacity, than you run the risk of flooding.
Now lets also say that each cannal or stream connected to the lake drains a set amount from the source. A little stream or ditch adds a small amount of output, while a big river or shipping canal adds a lot of drainage. The all drain into the sea, an underground river, or into an off-screen site that represents whatever it is downriver. Each field or industry connected to that stream increases its draw. Same with any person visiting the stream or source to get water. (Though in this case it would be small and temporary) If their source is dry, than the stream goes dry. Easy to walk across, but bad news for anything drawing on that source. The player could then use floodgates to control which fields get water in case of a drought. They could also build more reservoirs and storage cisterns to increase their water storage for times of need.
Ideally there would be enough water coming from the sources that if there was nothing else drawing from the streams, than there would be no risk of the streams or lakes drying up. (Unless you were playing an arid map where water shortages was part of the experience.) It would only be if you started drawing on the stream with heavy farming or water intense industries like beer brewing or tanning that you might start having problems.

That depends on what you want to get out of the game. Personally I always have disasters off because I'm more focused on building and designing my city, with the actual survival of my people being more of a shaping force than a desire for challenge.
That being said, I wouldn't mind factors that limit or change what resources you have access to. Maybe have something like a geology setting when you make a map that determines what kind and what quantities of minerals are generated for the map. Forget steel, if the only metal you have in the region is copper, you better start either importing iron, or get used to copper housewares and importing tin.

A compromise might be to have maybe something like a button for building sets, which organizes the buildings that are visually compatible together, while on the main toolbar have the buildings sorted by function.
The main problem with MM right now seems to be that it's too large and that no matter how you organize it, there will be simply too much content to allow finding anything to be easy. Kind of like what is happening with the jobs bar.

Basically as a long time fan of city builders and a real resource fanatic, I've long been considering how best to implement resources in a hypothetical city builder. I have no experience in coding so I have no idea how these ideas would work from a practical side. But I thought I would lay it out for anyone who might be interested. Most of this is based on my past experiences with city builders and on some of the questions and problems that have come out with trying to implement basic goods in banished.
Basically the idea would work something like the current system in Banished, with resources having specific properties that denominate its use. For example, you might have porcelain which would be classified as a houseware, and a luxury. Or something like ginger, which might be classified as a food, a vegetable, a medicine, a cuisine good, and a comfort good.
The system would kind of break down like this.
First you would have your necessities, the things your people cannot live without. This would be water, fuel, food, and tools. (Tools would not be strictly a necessity, but their need would certainly be universal enough.)
A household would gather water from the nearest source, be it a lake, stream, reservoir, well, or fountain. (The same for industries and buisnesses that need a constant supply of water like tanneries or farms.)
Fuel is what they need to heat their house and cook their food, and different fuels would have say a different heat rating which is basically how effective they are. (Some industries for example might demand fuel with a high heat rating.)
A lack of tools will not cause your citizens to die, but will severely reduce their efficiency in whatever they do. (You try planting a garden with just your hands.)
Food for it's part would be divided into several sub categories for the purpose of determining nutritional health. For simplicity's sake say starches, vegetables, fruit, and protein. If you have all four types of food you're in good shape.
Then you would have the goods your citizens use in daily life. My current thinking is to have goods classified in two ways. The first is the good's quality (common, comfort, and luxury.) The second is the good's classification, which would basically describe how the good is used by your citizens.
Common goods would basically be the goods people use in day to day living. The clothes on their backs, the bowls they eat out of, etc. Comfort goods would be those goods that are not necessary for day to day life, but which make life more bearable. Salt or pepper to put on food, nice furniture, or some simple perfume so you don't offend your neighbors with your stench. Luxuries would be those goods which are both expensive and opulent, good for showing off, but not necessarily good for anything else. Things like gold and diamond jewellery, silk coats dyed royal purple, marble statues and so on. For simplicity's sake, it might be better to classify them as lower, middle, and upper class goods.
Classifications I am imagining would just denominate how the good is generally used. The idea being that citizens will then have the ability to demand a wide range of goods, and not just consider themselves satisfied because their house is filled with carpets and nothing else. The way I am imagining it, you'd have the following categories.
-Housewares: Pottery, glassware, iron cookware... the things you'd use for cooking, eating and/or storing food and liquids.
-Textiles: Wool cloth, leather, dyed silk... the things you would use for clothing, bedding, tapestries, or rugs.
- Cuisine: Spices, herbs, salt, oil, sauce... things you would use to enhance or accompany food, but would not provide vital nutrition on their own.
-`Furniture: Baskets, Wooden furniture, lacquered chests, mirrors... basically furniture you would bring into your house to sit on, lay down on, eat off of, or store things in.
- Intoxicants: Beer, wine, tobacco, coffee... basically things that are consumed by your people for their chemical effects, not their nutritional value.
- Aromatics: Incense, perfume, soap... things that smell nice and help to cover up or eliminate unpleasant odors.
-Illumination: Candles, oil, gas lanterns... used to provide light during the night-time.
- Decoration: Jewelry, Statues, Decorative urns, oil paintings... Things that are mostly useful for looking good and showing off
I also had the idea to have a category for medicines, which would tell doctors what to stock in their clinics.
Basically the system would work is that each house has certain quality and category needs that must be fulfilled for it to be happy. (Ideally there would be many different ways of fulfilling these needs so that no two cities have to rely on the same goods, resources, or infrastructure to stay happy.) For example one house could be satisfied with date wine, stoneware pottery, linen cloth, cedar chests, and salt. While another house could be satisfied with barley beer, earthenware pottery, wool cloth, reed baskets, and lavender perfume.
This could also expand to other buildings like industries, or even public buildings like temples that can be set to consume different categories of goods. For example a temple consuming incense and candles.

You realize that nuts can count as the "meat" portion of the diet right? Probably the best solution there is to do what banished does and make meat part of a "protein" category, with maybe a few different options for how it can be filled, like with beans or tofu.

I do hope you'll keep the same diversity of food resources that you see here in Banished. I also hope you have the means of implementing things like basic and luxury goods. Other than that I look forward to see how this develops.